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In reflection to Michael's Hey Developers, You Suck - here's my rerant. Same situation, different company. The problem i have here is a lack of respect for data by not using normalized forms and referential integrity.

Since a lot of our work is aggregating massive amounts of data, i'm often stressed by the fact that a small mistake can have large consequences.

Did you hear that CDC overstated its obesity death figures? Did you hear that the FBI may scrap a $170 million software project?

Those are disgraceful and i work hard to prevent such and embarrassment to my company.

The other problem we have is strongly connecting data to code by using VBA and stovepiping our software. The problem with tying data and code is that we manually format our data to work with our code. This presents a problem when in 6 months we want to swap in new data. The problem with stovepiping is it produced non-flexible code. So when we want to add a feature (like multiuser) to an application, it's very difficult.

One last remark. TrickleUp, the software that runs my personal website, allows me to write code to the quality that i want. I suggest each person take up at least one project to relieve stress.